Annotations for Voice: Pause

There were poetry sections, but there wasn't a free-standing poetry library. And my response was of course we should have one, but it shouldn't be just an adjunct to any other organization or office. It should be a center of the life of poetry in our culture. And it should be a place, above all, that would be open to poets in particular and to the public in general. And a sort of communication center as well as a house of hospitality. That was my immediate response.

Why do we need poetry? Because every great civilization has demonstrated the need for myth and poetry in the effectiveness of the state itself beyond power, beyond military strength, beyond commerce. What a great civilization needs to demonstrate is the power of what it stands for in terms of human dignity and freedom. And the word, the myth, is essential to the survival of civilization, and to the culmination of its powers. I think anyone who studies history would have to agree to that.

I think that was central to my sense of loss, my sense of yearning. You know Henry James' wonderful phrase in one of his letters when he says, "the port from which I set out was the port of my loneliness."